Welcome to the home of SwiftCraftyMonkey Formulating Inc.! Join Susan as she obsesses about cosmetic chemistry and other things (some possibly related to monkeys)! Here you’ll find over 5,000 posts and formulas written over the past 16 years for everything from lotions, creams, and body butters to hair care products to fancy facial products filled with actives and cosmeceuticals! Enjoy the site without distractions – no ads, pop ups, sponsored posts, affiliate links, “one weird tricks” – all supported by readers like you.
So you’ve found a few cosmeceuticals you like and you’re wondering how you can incorporate them into a lovely facial product. For the most part, you’ll want to stick to leave on products like lotions or toners because a lot of them are completely wasted in a cleaning product as they’ll just wash off and...
So this kinda concludes our look at cosmeceuticals. There are just too many of them to research and review, but this doesn’t mean you won’t see more posts on them in the future…I just need to take a break for now and focus on how to use them in our products. (If you don’t know...
Matrixyl 3000 (INCI: Glycerin (and) Water (and) Butylene Glycol (and) Carbomer (and) Polysorbate 20 (and) Palmitoyl Oligopeptide (and) Palmitoyl Tetrapeptide-7) contains two matrikines – Pal-GHK and Pal-GQPR. It claims that it helps to “maintain skin’s youthful appearance” by offering anti-wrinkling and lifting effects. So what the heck does this all mean? Matrikines are “peptides liberated by...
Palmitoyl tetrapeptide-7 (formerly known as palmitoyl tetrapeptide-3 for some reason) is another polypeptide we can find as a cosmeceutical, although it seems the only place I’ve been able to find it is in Matrixyl 3000 as palmitoyl GQPR (glycine-glutamine-proline-arganine connected to palmitic acid). It’s attached to the palmitic acid to make it more oil solubility...
GHK is a tripeptide that has a strong affinity for copper, so it’s often called copper peptide or GHK-Cu. It occurs naturally in our blood, urine, and saliva and it is used in our bodies as a wound healer, anti-oxidant, and anti-inflammatory that can stimulate collagen and glycosaminoglycans (or GAGs), which bind water in the skin,...